arXiv subjects

Minghui Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Minghui Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

TopoSculpt: Betti-Steered Topological Sculpting of 3D Fine-grained Tubular Shapes

Medical tubular anatomical structures are inherently three-dimensional conduits with lumens, enclosing walls, and complex branching topologies. Accurate reconstruction of their geometry and topology is crucial for applications such as bronchoscopic navigation and cerebral arterial connectivity assessment. Existing methods often rely on voxel-wise overlap measures, which fail to capture topological correctness and completeness. Although topology-aware losses and persistent homology constraints have shown promise, they are usually applied patch-wise and cannot guarantee global preservation or correct geometric errors at inference. To address these limitations, we propose a novel TopoSculpt, a framework for topological refinement of 3D fine-grained tubular structures. TopoSculpt (i) adopts a holistic whole-region modeling strategy to capture full spatial context, (ii) first introduces a Topological Integrity Betti (TIB) constraint that jointly enforces Betti number priors and global integrity, and (iii) employs a curriculum refinement scheme with persistent homology to progressively correct errors from coarse to fine scales. Extensive experiments on challenging pulmonary airway and Circle of Willis datasets demonstrate substantial improvements in both geometry and topology. For instance, $β_{0}$ errors are reduced from 69.00 to 3.40 on the airway dataset and from 1.65 to 0.30 on the CoW dataset, with Tree length detected and branch detected rates improving by nearly 10\%. These results highlight the effectiveness of TopoSculpt in correcting critical topological errors and advancing the high-fidelity modeling of complex 3D tubular anatomy. The project homepage is available at: https://github.com/Puzzled-Hui/TopoSculpt.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TopoVST: Toward Topology-fidelitous Vessel Skeleton Tracking

Automatic extraction of vessel skeletons is crucial for many clinical applications. However, achieving topologically faithful delineation of thin vessel skeletons remains highly challenging, primarily due to frequent discontinuities and the presence of spurious skeleton segments. To address these difficulties, we propose TopoVST, a topology-fidelitious vessel skeleton tracker. TopoVST constructs multi-scale sphere graphs to sample the input image and employs graph neural networks to jointly estimate tracking directions and vessel radii. The utilization of multi-scale representations is enhanced through a gating-based feature fusion mechanism, while the issue of class imbalance during training is mitigated by embedding a geometry-aware weighting scheme into the directional loss. In addition, we design a wave-propagation-based skeleton tracking algorithm that explicitly mitigates the generation of spurious skeletons through space-occupancy filtering. We evaluate TopoVST on two vessel datasets with different geometries. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate that TopoVST achieves competitive performance in both overlapping and topological metrics. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/EndoluminalSurgicalVision-IMR/TopoVST.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TubeMLLM: A Foundation Model for Topology Knowledge Exploration in Vessel-like Anatomy

Modeling medical vessel-like anatomy is challenging due to its intricate topology and sensitivity to dataset shifts. Consequently, task-specific models often suffer from topological inconsistencies, including artificial disconnections and spurious merges. Motivated by the promise of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for zero-shot generalization, we propose TubeMLLM, a unified foundation model that couples structured understanding with controllable generation for medical vessel-like anatomy. By integrating topological priors through explicit natural language prompting and aligning them with visual representations in a shared-attention architecture, TubeMLLM significantly enhances topology-aware perception. Furthermore, we construct TubeMData, a pionner multimodal benchmark comprising comprehensive topology-centric tasks, and introduce an adaptive loss weighting strategy to emphasize topology-critical regions during training. Extensive experiments on fifteen diverse datasets demonstrate our superiority. Quantitatively, TubeMLLM achieves state-of-the-art out-of-distribution performance, substantially reducing global topological discrepancies on color fundus photography (decreasing the $β_{0}$ number error from 37.42 to 8.58 compared to baselines). Notably, TubeMLLM exhibits exceptional zero-shot cross-modality transferring ability on unseen X-ray angiography, achieving a Dice score of 67.50% while significantly reducing the $β_{0}$ error to 1.21. TubeMLLM also maintains robustness against degradations such as blur, noise, and low resolution. Furthermore, in topology-aware understanding tasks, the model achieves 97.38% accuracy in evaluating mask topological quality, significantly outperforming standard vision-language baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Long-Short Term Agents for Pure-Vision Bronchoscopy Robotic Autonomy

Accurate intraoperative navigation is essential for robot-assisted endoluminal intervention, but remains difficult because of limited endoscopic field of view and dynamic artifacts. Existing navigation platforms often rely on external localization technologies, such as electromagnetic tracking or shape sensing, which increase hardware complexity and remain vulnerable to intraoperative anatomical mismatch. We present a vision-only autonomy framework that performs long-horizon bronchoscopic navigation using preoperative CT-derived virtual targets and live endoscopic video, without external tracking during navigation. The framework uses hierarchical long-short agents: a short-term reactive agent for continuous low-latency motion control, and a long-term strategic agent for decision support at anatomically ambiguous points. When their recommendations conflict, a world-model critic predicts future visual states for candidate actions and selects the action whose predicted state best matches the target view. We evaluated the system in a high-fidelity airway phantom, three ex vivo porcine lungs, and a live porcine model. The system reached all planned segmental targets in the phantom, maintained 80\% success to the eighth generation ex vivo, and achieved in vivo navigation performance comparable to the expert bronchoscopist. These results support the preclinical feasibility of sensor-free autonomous bronchoscopic navigation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

EndoSERV: A Vision-based Endoluminal Robot Navigation System

Robot-assisted endoluminal procedures are increasingly used for early cancer intervention. However, the intricate, narrow and tortuous pathways within the luminal anatomy pose substantial difficulties for robot navigation. Vision-based navigation offers a promising solution, but existing localization approaches are error-prone due to tissue deformation, in vivo artifacts and a lack of distinctive landmarks for consistent localization. This paper presents a novel EndoSERV localization method to address these challenges. It includes two main parts, \textit{i.e.}, \textbf{SE}gment-to-structure and \textbf{R}eal-to-\textbf{V}irtual mapping, and hence the name. For long-range and complex luminal structures, we divide them into smaller sub-segments and estimate the odometry independently. To cater for label insufficiency, an efficient transfer technique maps real image features to the virtual domain to use virtual pose ground truth. The training phases of EndoSERV include an offline pretraining to extract texture-agnostic features, and an online phase that adapts to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments based on both public and clinical datasets have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method even without any real pose labels.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

U-VLM: Hierarchical Vision Language Modeling for Report Generation

Automated radiology report generation is key for reducing radiologist workload and improving diagnostic consistency, yet generating accurate reports for 3D medical imaging remains challenging. Existing vision-language models face two limitations: they do not leverage segmentation-pretrained encoders, and they inject visual features only at the input layer of language models, losing multi-scale information. We propose U-VLM, which enables hierarchical vision-language modeling in both training and architecture: (1) progressive training from segmentation to classification to report generation, and (2) multi-layer visual injection that routes U-Net encoder features to corresponding language model layers. Each training stage can leverage different datasets without unified annotations. U-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CT-RATE (F1: 0.414 vs 0.258, BLEU-mean: 0.349 vs 0.305) and AbdomenAtlas 3.0 (F1: 0.624 vs 0.518 for segmentation-based detection) using only a 0.1B decoder trained from scratch, demonstrating that well-designed vision encoder pretraining outweighs the benefits of 7B+ pre-trained language models. Ablation studies show that progressive pretraining significantly improves F1, while multi-layer injection improves BLEU-mean. Code is available at https://github.com/yinghemedical/U-VLM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PaperX: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Academic Presentation Generation with Scholar DAG

Transforming scientific papers into multimodal presentation content is essential for research dissemination but remains labor intensive. Existing automated solutions typically treat each format as an isolated downstream task, leading to redundant processing and semantic inconsistency. We introduce PaperX, a unified framework that models academic presentation generation as a structural transformation and rendering process. Central to our approach is the Scholar DAG, an intermediate representation that decouples the paper's logical structure from its final presentation syntax. By applying adaptive graph traversal strategies, PaperX generates diverse, high quality outputs from a single source. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves the state of the art performance in content fidelity and aesthetic quality while significantly improving cost efficiency compared to specialized single task agents.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Conditional Autoencoder for Generating Binary Neutron Star Waveforms with Tidal and Precession Effects

Gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers provide critical insights into dense matter physics and strong-field gravity, yet accurate waveform modeling remains computationally intensive. We present a deep generative model for gravitational waveforms from binary neutron star mergers that captures the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown phases while incorporating spin precession and tidal effects. Using a conditional autoencoder architecture, the model efficiently produces high-fidelity waveforms across a broad parameter space, including component masses (m1, m2), spin components (S1x, S1y, S1z, S2x, S2y, S2z), and tidal deformabilities (Lambda1, Lambda2). Trained on 1*10^6 waveforms generated by the IMRPhenomXP_NRTidalv2 model, our network achieves a mean mismatch of 2.13*10^-3. The generation time for a single waveform is 0.12 s, compared to 0.66 s for IMRPhenomXP_NRTidalv2, representing a speedup of about fivefold. When generating 1000 waveforms, the model completes the task in 0.75 s, roughly ten times faster than the baseline. This significant acceleration facilitates rapid parameter estimation and real-time gravitational-wave searches. With improved precision and efficiency, the model can support low-latency detection and broader applications in multi-messenger astrophysics.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Large Model Driven Solar Activity AI Forecaster: A Scalable Dual Data-Model Framework

Solar activity drives space weather, affecting Earth's magnetosphere and technological infrastructure, which makes accurate solar flare forecasting critical. Current space weather models under-utilize multi-modal solar data, lack iterative enhancement via expert knowledge, and rely heavily on human forecasters under the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) paradigm. Here we present the "Solar Activity AI Forecaster", a scalable dual data-model driven framework built on foundational models, integrating expert knowledge to autonomously replicate human forecasting tasks with quantifiable outputs. It is implemented in the OODA paradigm and comprises three modules: a Situational Perception Module that generates daily solar situation awareness maps by integrating multi-modal observations; In-Depth Analysis Tools that characterize key solar features (active regions, coronal holes, filaments); and a Flare Prediction Module that forecasts strong flares for the full solar disk and active regions. Executed within a few minutes, the model outperforms or matches human forecasters in generalization across multi-source data, forecast accuracy, and operational efficiency. This work establishes a new paradigm for AI-based space weather forecasting, demonstrating AI's potential to enhance forecast accuracy and efficiency, and paving the way for autonomous operational forecasting systems.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Temporal Differential Fields for 4D Motion Modeling via Image-to-Video Synthesis

Temporal modeling on regular respiration-induced motions is crucial to image-guided clinical applications. Existing methods cannot simulate temporal motions unless high-dose imaging scans including starting and ending frames exist simultaneously. However, in the preoperative data acquisition stage, the slight movement of patients may result in dynamic backgrounds between the first and last frames in a respiratory period. This additional deviation can hardly be removed by image registration, thus affecting the temporal modeling. To address that limitation, we pioneeringly simulate the regular motion process via the image-to-video (I2V) synthesis framework, which animates with the first frame to forecast future frames of a given length. Besides, to promote the temporal consistency of animated videos, we devise the Temporal Differential Diffusion Model to generate temporal differential fields, which measure the relative differential representations between adjacent frames. The prompt attention layer is devised for fine-grained differential fields, and the field augmented layer is adopted to better interact these fields with the I2V framework, promoting more accurate temporal variation of synthesized videos. Extensive results on ACDC cardiac and 4D Lung datasets reveal that our approach simulates 4D videos along the intrinsic motion trajectory, rivaling other competitive methods on perceptual similarity and temporal consistency. Codes will be available soon.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Shape-aware Sampling Matters in the Modeling of Multi-Class Tubular Structures

Accurate multi-class tubular modeling is critical for precise lesion localization and optimal treatment planning. Deep learning methods enable automated shape modeling by prioritizing volumetric overlap accuracy. However, the inherent complexity of fine-grained semantic tubular shapes is not fully emphasized by overlap accuracy, resulting in reduced topological preservation. To address this, we propose the Shapeaware Sampling (SAS), which optimizes patchsize allocation for online sampling and extracts a topology-preserved skeletal representation for the objective function. Fractal Dimension-based Patchsize (FDPS) is first introduced to quantify semantic tubular shape complexity through axis-specific fractal dimension analysis. Axes with higher fractal complexity are then sampled with smaller patchsizes to capture fine-grained features and resolve structural intricacies. In addition, Minimum Path-Cost Skeletonization (MPC-Skel) is employed to sample topologically consistent skeletal representations of semantic tubular shapes for skeleton-weighted objective functions. MPC-Skel reduces artifacts from conventional skeletonization methods and directs the focus to critical topological regions, enhancing tubular topology preservation. SAS is computationally efficient and easily integrable into optimization pipelines. Evaluation on two semantic tubular datasets showed consistent improvements in both volumetric overlap and topological integrity metrics.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Adaptive Differential Denoising for Respiratory Sounds Classification

Automated respiratory sound classification faces practical challenges from background noise and insufficient denoising in existing systems. We propose Adaptive Differential Denoising network, that integrates noise suppression and pathological feature preservation via three innovations: 1) Adaptive Frequency Filter with learnable spectral masks and soft shrink to eliminate noise while retaining diagnostic high-frequency components; 2) A Differential Denoise Layer using differential attention to reduce noise-induced variations through augmented sample comparisons; 3) A bias denoising loss jointly optimizing classification and robustness without clean labels. Experiments on the ICBHI2017 dataset show that our method achieves 65.53\% of the Score, which is improved by 1.99\% over the previous sota method. The code is available in https://github.com/deegy666/ADD-RSC

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

SLoRD: Structural Low-Rank Descriptors for Shape Consistency in Vertebrae Segmentation

Automatic and precise multi-class vertebrae segmentation from CT images is crucial for various clinical applications. However, due to similar appearances between adjacent vertebrae and the existence of various pathologies, existing single-stage and multi-stage methods suffer from imprecise vertebrae segmentation. Essentially, these methods fail to explicitly impose both contour precision and intra-vertebrae voxel consistency constraints synchronously, resulting in the intra-vertebrae segmentation inconsistency, which refers to multiple label predictions inside a singular vertebra. In this work, we intend to label complete binary masks with sequential indices to address that challenge. Specifically, a contour generation network is proposed based on Structural Low-Rank Descriptors for shape consistency, termed SLoRD. For a structural representation of vertebral contours, we adopt the spherical coordinate system and devise the spherical centroid to calculate contour descriptors. Due to vertebrae's similar appearances, basic contour descriptors can be acquired offline to restore original contours. Therefore, SLoRD leverages these contour priors and explicit shape constraints to facilitate regressed contour points close to vertebral surfaces. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on VerSe 2019 and 2020 demonstrate the superior performance of our framework over other single-stage and multi-stage state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Further, SLoRD is a plug-and-play framework to refine the segmentation inconsistency existing in coarse predictions from other approaches. Source codes are available.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Ordered-subsets Multi-diffusion Model for Sparse-view CT Reconstruction

Score-based diffusion models have shown significant promise in the field of sparse-view CT reconstruction. However, the projection dataset is large and riddled with redundancy. Consequently, applying the diffusion model to unprocessed data results in lower learning effectiveness and higher learning difficulty, frequently leading to reconstructed images that lack fine details. To address these issues, we propose the ordered-subsets multi-diffusion model (OSMM) for sparse-view CT reconstruction. The OSMM innovatively divides the CT projection data into equal subsets and employs multi-subsets diffusion model (MSDM) to learn from each subset independently. This targeted learning approach reduces complexity and enhances the reconstruction of fine details. Furthermore, the integration of one-whole diffusion model (OWDM) with complete sinogram data acts as a global information constraint, which can reduce the possibility of generating erroneous or inconsistent sinogram information. Moreover, the OSMM's unsupervised learning framework provides strong robustness and generalizability, adapting seamlessly to varying sparsity levels of CT sinograms. This ensures consistent and reliable performance across different clinical scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that OSMM outperforms traditional diffusion models in terms of image quality and noise resilience, offering a powerful and versatile solution for advanced CT imaging in sparse-view scenarios.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Reflecting Topology Consistency and Abnormality via Learnable Attentions for Airway Labeling

Accurate airway anatomical labeling is crucial for clinicians to identify and navigate complex bronchial structures during bronchoscopy. Automatic airway anatomical labeling is challenging due to significant individual variability and anatomical variations. Previous methods are prone to generate inconsistent predictions, which is harmful for preoperative planning and intraoperative navigation. This paper aims to address these challenges by proposing a novel method that enhances topological consistency and improves the detection of abnormal airway branches. We propose a novel approach incorporating two modules: the Soft Subtree Consistency (SSC) and the Abnormal Branch Saliency (ABS). The SSC module constructs a soft subtree to capture clinically relevant topological relationships, allowing for flexible feature aggregation within and across subtrees. The ABS module facilitates the interaction between node features and prototypes to distinguish abnormal branches, preventing the erroneous aggregation of features between normal and abnormal nodes. Evaluated on a challenging dataset characterized by severe airway distortion and atrophy, our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Specifically, it attains a 91.4% accuracy at the segmental level and an 83.7% accuracy at the subsegmental level, representing a 1.4% increase in subsegmental accuracy and a 3.1% increase in topological consistency. Notably, the method demonstrates reliable performance in cases with disease-induced airway deformities, ensuring consistent and accurate labeling.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

AirMorph: Topology-Preserving Deep Learning for Pulmonary Airway Analysis

Accurate anatomical labeling and analysis of the pulmonary structure and its surrounding anatomy from thoracic CT is getting increasingly important for understanding the etilogy of abnormalities or supporting targetted therapy and early interventions. Whilst lung and airway cell atlases have been attempted, there is a lack of fine-grained morphological atlases that are clinically deployable. In this work, we introduce AirMorph, a robust, end-to-end deep learning pipeline enabling fully automatic and comprehensive airway anatomical labeling at lobar, segmental, and subsegmental resolutions that can be used to create digital atlases of the lung. Evaluated across large-scale multi-center datasets comprising diverse pulmonary conditions, the AirMorph consistently outperformed existing segmentation and labeling methods in terms of accuracy, topological consistency, and completeness. To simplify clinical interpretation, we further introduce a compact anatomical signature quantifying critical morphological airway features, including stenosis, ectasia, tortuosity, divergence, length, and complexity. When applied to various pulmonary diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis, emphysema, atelectasis, consolidation, and reticular opacities, it demonstrates strong discriminative power, revealing disease-specific morphological patterns with high interpretability and explainability. Additionally, AirMorph supports efficient automated branching pattern analysis, potentially enhancing bronchoscopic navigation planning and procedural safety, offering a valuable clinical tool for improved diagnosis, targeted treatment, and personalized patient care.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Identification of Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds from Cosmic String Using Machine Learning

Cosmic strings play a crucial role in enhancing our understanding of the fundamental structure and evolution of the universe, unifying our knowledge of cosmology, and potentially unveiling new physical laws and phenomena. The advent and operation of space-based detectors provide an important opportunity for detecting stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWB) generated by cosmic strings. However, the intricate nature of SGWB poses a formidable challenge in distinguishing its signal from the complex noise by some traditional methods. Therefore, we attempt to identify SGWB based on machine learning. Our findings show that the joint detection of LISA and Taiji significantly outperforms individual detectors, and even in the presence of numerous low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) signals, the identification accuracy remains exceptionally high with 95%. Although our discussion is based solely on simulated data, the relevant methods can provide data-driven analytical capabilities for future observations of SGWB.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Class Segmentation of Aortic Branches and Zones in Computed Tomography Angiography: The AortaSeg24 Challenge

Multi-class segmentation of the aorta in computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans is essential for diagnosing and planning complex endovascular treatments for patients with aortic dissections. However, existing methods reduce aortic segmentation to a binary problem, limiting their ability to measure diameters across different branches and zones. Furthermore, no open-source dataset is currently available to support the development of multi-class aortic segmentation methods. To address this gap, we organized the AortaSeg24 MICCAI Challenge, introducing the first dataset of 100 CTA volumes annotated for 23 clinically relevant aortic branches and zones. This dataset was designed to facilitate both model development and validation. The challenge attracted 121 teams worldwide, with participants leveraging state-of-the-art frameworks such as nnU-Net and exploring novel techniques, including cascaded models, data augmentation strategies, and custom loss functions. We evaluated the submitted algorithms using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Normalized Surface Distance (NSD), highlighting the approaches adopted by the top five performing teams. This paper presents the challenge design, dataset details, evaluation metrics, and an in-depth analysis of the top-performing algorithms. The annotated dataset, evaluation code, and implementations of the leading methods are publicly available to support further research. All resources can be accessed at https://aortaseg24.grand-challenge.org.

eess.IV↗